One of the first few lines of opener, We Used To Vacation, “Still things could be much worse” immediately sets the mind alight. How could things be much worse? What led to things being so bad in the first place? Robbers & Cowards is very much an album of discovery, each song leading you through with infectious hooks and sublimely paced melodies to the next song, the next story.

Mystery, like stepping into a dark cave, has a firm hold on songs such as the ever-so-catchy Hang Me Up To Dry with its fantastic riff driving all the way through. Seemingly disparate streams of thought echo around the listener’s head, the more you hear, the more confused you are. However, the songs themselves all seem to follow a set path, the odd bit of clashing piano adding a random Maroon 5-esque sound to the proceedings. The problem is, the unexpected soon comes to be expected. It’s an album that is broken and lost while simultaneously being as structured as they come. An album struggling with its identity.

Songs like God, Make Up Your Mind illustrate this philosophy of random yet not so random; the strange lyrics which you just know have a deeper meaning “from New York to New Orleans, played alphabet”; the piano introing deep within the song; an unexpected but seamless transition to a heavier sound, back to chilling out in the summer sun. The lo-fi intro, the slightly whining, slightly relaxed voice, conjuring images of cocktails on a Hawaiian beach; staring at the sky with a content mind yet for some reason, not everything’s perfect.

It’s a good metaphor for the album as a whole, sometimes lo-fi, sometimes rocking, sometimes catchy, sometimes random, sometimes delivering the unexpected, yet something is wrong. It isn’t quite an album of contrasts, although thats what it wants to be, it keeps the listener on rails, delivering song after song in a similar yet crucially just different vein, but an ominous cloud of not quite getting it right is hovering just above.

In fact, it doesn’t know what it wants to be. “There’s nothing to do here, some just whine and complain” in Hospital Beds is quite right, it’s an album that is whining and complaining, but so am I, later in the song “Joy and misery” is mentioned, and that’s what this album truly is. Joy and misery. And that’s why it doesn’t work. Just at that moment when your sensations are soaring, when your mind is on fire with possibilities, when you can see the happiness and the hope, a song or a melody or a lyric will be introduced to dampen those emotions. Yes, life has its ups and downs but Robbers & Cowards is attempting to be two things at once, and to a certain extent, completely failing. You just can’t be a robber and a coward.

 3/5